Photo By Cpl. Anna Higman | U.S. Marines with 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, I...... read more read more
Subscribe
(U.S. Marine Corps story by Cpl. Damian Oso)
MARINE CORPS AIR GROUND COMBAT CENTER, Twentynine Palms, Calif. – The Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command (MAGTFTC) Battle Simulation Center (BSC) is partnering with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to study and improve Marine Corps training under a program called Objective Prediction of Team Effectiveness via Models of Performance Outcomes, or OP TEMPO.
DARPA is known for developing game-changing technologies such as the Internet, GPS, drones, and stealth aircraft. DARPA also provides funding for research studies that have the potential to impact national security and the DoD. The OP TEMPO program seeks to develop novel signatures and predictive models of DoD team performance, enabling completely new ways to assess team dynamics and mission readiness. DARPA selected USMC fire support teams (FiSTs) as an ideal model for studying dynamic team coordination during complex, high-risk operations.
DARPA conducted the first of three planned OP TEMPO data collection events at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC), Twentynine Palms, California, April 7-11, 2025. DARPA is helping the Marine Corps develop a capability that objectively measures team performance by capturing physiological and behavioral signals to establish what makes a team efficient and what brings them together.
“One value of having Marines participate in training and different data collection events like this is that they see what this is all about, and when they see teams of performers instrumenting them up, measuring brain wave activity while they're doing FiST drills, they see that they need to recognize that there's a lot of other people that are working day in and day out to figure out how to make us more lethal, more survivable and have that strategic advantage over adversary forces,” said Lt. Col. Jesse Attig, modeling and simulation officer with the MAGTFTC BSC at MCAGCC.
OP TEMPO is looking at a range of signals such as heart rate, brain waves, eye movement, facial expressions, and communication patterns (e.g., how Marines speak to each other) to see if those signals correlate to how a team performs while completing FiST training scenarios.
This event demonstrated, for the first time ever, collection of multiple high-fidelity physiological and behavioral signals from active duty teams (not just individuals) in a real world training environment, rather than in a lab-based setting. Capturing data during actual training events increases the potential for program outputs to transition to the USMC and other service partners, and to provide impactful benefits to team training and warfighter readiness.
Creating a baseline of what makes a team efficient will help the Marine Corps improve training by investing in faster training schedules and technologies that are proven to help bring a team together. This baseline has the potential to increase the Marine Corps’ understanding of how various training interventions or operational capabilities could impact performance. For example, how adding autonomous equipment into a training scenario will impact not only their efficiency, but also the human factors of morale, fatigue, and fear.
The ability to put a constant flow of Marines through a wide spectrum of scenarios with increasing difficulty and complexity was a primary motivator for DARPA to select MAGTFTC’s BSC for this first ever data collection event. The BSC provides the opportunity to collect data under real world training conditions, but also in a controlled setting to ensure data quality and reproduceable results.
As this research continues, the remaining data collection events will not only provide the volume of data needed to develop accurate team performance models, but will also widen the spectrum of data collected to ensure that the resulting models are generalizable to additional USMC and DoD teams.
Securing the upper hand over our adversaries will always be paramount, and the ability to optimize training for the future fight is crucial to achieving ultimate success.
“The strategic partnership that MAGTFTC has with DARPA is extremely important because you look at the different supporting elements within MAGTF Training Command and it is a perfect test ground,” said Attig. “I think that's why we really need to continue that partnership, because there's no better place to test these capabilities than the live training ranges that we have here, or the training venues like the battle sim Center provides.”
-30-
| Date Taken: | 03.20.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 06.12.2025 17:31 |
| Story ID: | 500067 |
| Location: | TWENTYNINE PALMS, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 90 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Future of Warfighting: DARPA innovates training at MCAGCC, by Cpl Damian Oso, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
